Try Supercar Rental

Want a supercar like a Ferrari F430 or a Lamborghini Gallardo? Not sure whether you can afford it? Well, there are other ways of driving supercars – rental or a rental club. If you go for supercar rental you can drive a supercar when you want, for a day, or a few days or a week, depending on your budget.

Supercar rental is a very real alternative to buying a supercar for $200,000 or so, which means you are losing about $30,000 a year in depreciation, and a few thousand dollars a year in service charges, tires and so on.

Instead, with supercar rental you pay as much as you want to use it maybe $10,000 to $30,000 a year.

Some supercars are very expensive to maintain because access to the engine is not easy to change the timing belt on a Ferrari F360 you need to remove the engine that's an extra $1,000 or so.

The real cost of ownership of a supercar is very high, which is why superar rental can be attractive, although it may seem expensive at first. If you keep a supercar for three years it is likely to cost you over $100,000 in that period.

This assumes you get a good trade-in price at the end - which you may not. Supercar rental is much simpler than ownership unless you want that car 365 days a year!

Where do you rent a supercar? Well, you can't pick one up at any Avis or Hertz rental office to be sure, but there are now quite a few supercar rental companies in places as diverse as las Vegas, New York, Florida, London, UK, the south of Spain and South Africa. In fact, you can get yourself a decent car to rent in most major cities. For example, in Las Vegas you can go on a sports car run for six hours for just $349, which could be in something like a Lotus Elise. Or, you could go one better and do the run in a Ferrari F360 or Porsche 996 Carrera for $599. That's a good 'taster'.

If you want simple rental, you will pay a good deal more - $900 for half a day in a Lamborghini Gallardo, or $1,400 for a full day. You can rent a Porsche Boxster or a Corvette in quite a few places for around $400 a day.

In the UK you can get an Aston Martin V8 Vantage for £550 for one day, or a Lamborghini Gallardo for £795 these prices are similar to those in the USA. One of the top rental companies for prestige cars in the UK is Guy Salmon, and they now offer a variety of supercars including an Aston Martin Vanquish at 646.25 and Lamborghini Gallardo for £822.50 a day - about $1,300 and $1,650. You are usually liable for damage to the car up to about $5,000-7,000, so for peace of mind you might want to reduce this amount, which would increase the cost.

There are also a number of rental clubs in the USA and UK. The idea is that you stump up quite a sum each year and get a number of days driving. You use up more of your quota if you drive a Ferrari F430 than if you have something like a Porsche 911. For example, the Club Ecurie 25 in the UK offers a variety of cars including the Ferrari F430, Lamborghini Gallardo and Aston Martin V8 Vantage. You pay about 10,000 ($20,000) a year and can get 30 to 45 days or 4,500 miles a year in a supercar for that sum.

Is there a downside? Well, you can't say you own one of these cars, and you might not be able to get it exactly when you want it.

These clubs might sound expensive, but you can't get away from the fact that superars are expensive very expensive! Also, bear in mind that you will wait three years before you can buy a Ferrari F430, and the annual cost of any decent supercar is about twice what you would pay the club. Incidentally, 4,500 miles is more than the average mileage of a supercar, so a supercar rental club is not such a bad deal.